Many prefer the culture they were born into, blind and unknowing, to what they might freely and rationally choose.
For the benefits it provides are the privileges they were born to, shared unevenly, and the virtues it honors are the justifications for those privileges.
Rawls’s veil of ignorance is a test of the integrity of their situated choices, that is, their visceral political reflexes (the bricks with which the MAGA house is built).
Rawls’s veil of ignorance is a thought-experiment in which the subject being tested chooses a what seems the fairest form of government without foreknowledge of the social position they were born to in it.
If you don’t know about Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Google it! If you’re not using your device to boost your knowledge, you’re using it to magnify your ignorance.
And if you’ve been magnifying your ignorance, you’ve used your knowledge portal to step into a universe that’s all wrong. Blinded by the sirens and bullhorns, the bells and whistles, you’re marching off to battle as cannon fodder in someone else’s army. Look closely at the character of your leader. What does that tell you about where he’s leading you?
Let us in!
As Sweden knows, in NATO, Turkey is the new France.
And Hungary’s Viktor Orban is the new Quisling.
Somehow, we got the Little Red Riding Hood story wrong. It wasn’t a wolf. It was a bear.
And that same bear blew down the little piggies’ houses, the ones that weren’t made from durable NATO bricks.
We are survival machines capable of repurposing ourselves as moral agents.
But this process is never complete, and can never be empirically confirmed. This claim involves two of Kant’s transcendental conditions, that is, fundamental assumptions without which major activities that define human beings cannot exist or are without meaning: 1) the theoretical or scientific understanding of phenomena expounded in Kant’s 1st critique, 2) the moral reasoning about the free actions of agents expounded in Kant’s 2nd critique.
As a kicker, the capacity for self re-purposing is probably the bridge too far that AI can never cross — since AI is algorithm-driven and can only follow the top-line purpose programmed into it. The human ability to be left at a loss (long considered a weakness) allows humans to start over, experiment, improvise, and fundamentally rethink their approach, their plans, and even their identity, under conditions of uncertainty.
Algorithms are guided by certainties. Even building in a randomizer only allows the algorithm to “improvise” among pre-programmed options.
Big data can be endlessly sifted and rearranged, and novel correlations discovered. But any new approach, goal, or recongized need for fresh data unforeseen by the original, human programmer remains invisible to the algorithm, and beyond any possible “experience” of a deep learning AI.
Human beings, both fortunately and unfortunately, can deviate from algorithms, patterns, logic, truth, common sense, or anything else. In other words, the human capacity for screwing up, for misusing and deviating from its original purposes (those programmed in by natural selection), and even for imagining whole new purposes, both useful and useless, both good and evil, sets us part from mere machines, whether those machines are animal, vegetable, or mineral.
How Is It Possible?
We are survival machines capable of repurposing ourselves as moral agents because of two connected capacities whose symbiotic evolution has set human beings apart from other animals: the intertwined capacities of language and reasoning.
Some more developed animals have both of these in at least rudimentary forms, but no other animal has developed them far enough to create cultures that are fundamentally (rather than haphazardly and occasionally) tool-using cultures.
All other animals are stuck at the hunter-gatherer stage, where we too were stuck for ages. They have produced neither agricultural, craft guild, industrial manufacturing, information-processing, nor knowledge-networking cultures.
But, because of these cultural transformations, human beings are now the preeminently cultural species; humans are defined at least as much by their culture as by their nature.
Indeed, human cultural technology has arrived at the point, laden with both promise and peril, at which it can modify, revise, and perhaps even reinvent human nature (as, arguably, the emergence of moral agency has already done, though in a very different sense), by controlling the genetic determinants of our biological nature. (This is an observation, not an invitation. The way forward is strewn with dangers.)
There seem to me to be three stages in the re-purposing of a survival machine to function as a fully moral agent.
Social/tribal. Do what your pack requires and avoid what it prohibits. This is really just the displacement of the survival mechanism of the single organism to the social community that defines social animals. These practices are essentially amoral, sustained by natural selection only when they permit or advance the survival of the societies formed by social animals. Yet they may include forms of emotional sympathy which allow for group bonds and may later become the basis for true moral agency. Yet they may also be coldly prudent, as when migratory grazers leave behind the sick or injured who cannot keep up with the herd’s necessary forward migration.
Religious. Follow a set of encouraged and prohibited actions that are semi-universal (at least within, initially, the tribe, but often later within an expanding community of converts). Religion appears coterminous with human cultural existence, and human culture arose very early in human development. Religions, especially those that emerged in the Axial Age, have a tendency toward universalism (applied at least among those who accept the faith), yet they also contain vestigial tribal elements, to which the tribe (however broadly defined) reverts in times of crisis. Thus, crimes perpetrated with religious sanction or complicity are about as numerous as its moral achievements (thus, par for the course compared to other human institutions).
Universalist. Follow a set of rational procedures which any other rational being could, in principle, follow. This has both a theoretical form, best illustrated by mathematics, and a practical/moral form.
Only universalism offers a way to escape from the curse of the conditioned survival machine because only it can determine problem solutions and other choices by an internal logic independently of the particular cultural circumstances that define a cultural animal like man, thus acting as a standard accessed in language and verifiable by procedures accessible to any rational being.
All-or-None Logic of Rights-based Moralities
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But how can an animal, necessarily born under and into a particular set of circumstances, ever escape the particularity of its origin?
In one sense, it cannot. That individual can never access a universal system and way of thinking except through particular experiences from which it most often learns (or, more rarely, discovers or invents) the self-defining system.
But in another sense it can. I will make this case in Part 2 of this 2-part series, showing that this is true for both theoretical and moral truths, and for much the same reasons.
Until then, I will offer this tantalizing hint about the moral side of this. The coherence of any form of rights-based morality, whether the social contract or Kant’s categorical imperative, depends upon claims that can be advanced by any rational being and recognized by any other rational being, when both recognize themselves as mutual members of a community composed of rational beings.
And this is as true for Hobbes as it is for Rawls (Locke, Kant, etc.), with this difference, for Hobbes it must be an empirical community capable of enforcing its laws, while Rawls points to a higher law above empirical law (i.e., positive law) enforced by sovereign power, and to a higher, if only virtual, community.
These Two Thoughts are in reference to the 5/1/2018 post “Breaking Out of Machiavelli’s World.”
Political Morality, Risk, and Good Government
Safety and security always argue for wary distrust and expediency.
That is the truth embodied in the state of nature in the social contracts theorists Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
Acting morally is always a risk, viewed from that perspective.
The social contract is intended to minimize the risk of trust when extended beyond the circle of one’s trusted intimates.
The social contract more reliably protects one from being butchered by one’s neighbor than from being outmaneuvered and victimized by a rival party.
Politics is the arena in which fellow citizens sometimes work together to advance their common interests, and sometimes pursue factional interests at the expense of others (though within constitutional limits).
Oh, my, I am a cynic!
Free Will and Determinism, and Where that Leaves Morality
First let’s ditch the more metaphysical term free will, with its very non-empirical Christian roots, for the Aristotelian term choice (proairesis), rooted in practice and the practical.
Unlike free will, choice only requires that there be alternatives to choose from, and that the choice can be governed by reason and deliberation, not that there be some kind of cosmic disconnect between the choosing agent and the environment they are enmeshed in.
From this perspective, and compatible with the deterministic one, agents are admittedly driven by needs and adaptive to their environments.
The question then is not “Do agents act free from external influence?” That is a meaningless question. If agents had neither perceived needs nor desires, and faced neither perceived threats nor opportunities, they would not need the power of acting, nor would it have evolved for them. They would be plants.
The question is “Do the purposes that motivate agents allow them to coexist in peace or not?”
And, surprise, surprise, the farther the agent’s purposes are from maximizing their own power, wealth and pleasure, and the nearer the agent’s purposes are to abiding by a rational construct within which each acknowledges the other as having an equal claim to pursue purposes that permit others to pursue their own purposes, the more we accept them as morally sound and desirable neighbors and fellow-citizens.
Morality is the willingness to pursue one’s own goals within a rationally-constructed framework to which all could, in principle, agree.
What that “in principle” means is made clear in an image given us by John Rawls: justice is that social organization which anyone would choose, had they to choose from behind a “veil of ignorance”, that is, without knowing whether the social organization would favor those like themselves.
If that’s not clear, think simply, who would choose a system built on slavery, if they themselves might have to play the role of slave?
So, choice and morality mean the ability and willingness to set aside insatiable egoistic desires in favor of the rational construct of a community pursuing diverse ends in mutual respect, at least formally, that is, granting another’s right to choose differently from themselves.
Choice and morality substitute rational and compatible motives for natural and egoistic ones.
Good and bad persons are both perfectly natural, and we can trace out the formative (i.e., causal) histories of both. But for practical purposes, you surround yourself with as many good persons as you can, and avoid the bad ones as best you can.
When All Is Said and Dunn 